1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus for and method of recognizing hand-written characters to prevent a character, whose frequency of use is low and which is erroneously recognized easily, from being erroneously recognized by intentionally decreasing an evaluated value of the character when an input hand-written character is recognized, and particularly to an apparatus for and method of recognizing hand-written characters in which a special dictionary or a so-called minus dictionary for decreasing the evaluated value of the hand-written character upon recognizing the hand-written character is provided.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, a hand-written character recognizing apparatus or the like has received a remarkable attention as easy handling input apparatus instead of a keyboard in a technical field of an electronic note book or portable computer, electronic dictionary, personal computer and so on.
FIG. 1 is a block diagram showing an arrangement of the hand-written character recognizing apparatus.
As shown in FIG. 1, the hand-written character recognizing apparatus of this example investigates the hand writing of a character entered by a light pen or a tablet through a hand-written character input apparatus 1, recognizes the character by a recognition processing apparatus 3 and inputs the recognition result into an application apparatus 6. Before and after the recognition processing apparatus 3 there are provided a recognition pre-processing apparatus 2 and a recognition post-processing apparatus 5, respectively. The recognition pre-processing apparatus 2 carries out such a processing that the output or hand-writing from the hand-written character input apparatus 1 is converted into a type to be easily recognized. A character corresponding to the handwriting thus processed by the pre-processing apparatus 2 is recognized in the recognition apparatus 3 by using a recognition dictionary. On the other hand, the recognition post-processing apparatus 5 determines whether or not the recognized result by the recognition apparatus 3 is correct. If the recognized result thereby is incorrect, then the result is corrected or recognized again.
Then, the character, which has been recognized as above, is input to the application apparatus 6 such as the portable computer, electronic dictionary, personal computer or the like to be utilized in accordance with object, use and so on thereof.
FIG. 2 is a block diagram showing a schematic arrangement of an apparatus which is used to execute the character recognition processing according to the present invention.
According to this apparatus, a character to be recognized is entered by a tablet 20 or a keyboard, shown by a broken-line block 25, to a processing apparatus or central processing unit (CPU) 21, which then recognizes the input character by using information necessary for recognition stored in a ROM 22. A recognized result is displayed on a display device 23 and also stored in a RAM 24.
Although the conventional character recognition apparatus has been roughly described, its hand-written character recognizing rate is low and hence its hand-written character recognizing rate does not reach a level for a practical use. Therefore, it is highly desired that hand-written character recognizing accuracy is improved for new group of products which utilize a hand-written character recognizing apparatus.
By the way, since there are many types of Japanese characters, it can not be avoided that there appears a character which can not be recognized or is difficult to be recognized. In this aspect, there is already proposed such a system which is provided with a user's dictionary for hand-written characters. However, provision of such the dictionary is not so enough to remove problem of erroneous recognition for hand-written characters.
When, in order to remove the defect of the conventional apparatus, a new character dictionary is added by a user's dictionary for hand-written characters, recognition for a character which presents a problem before the user's dictionary is used can be normally recognized. On the other hand, a character, which can be normally recognized without any problem before the user's dictionary is used, is badly affected on its recognition.